


handle with care

by loveleee



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: AU, Angst with a Happy Ending, Christmas, F/M, Private Investigators, childhood-friends-to-lovers-to-exes-to-business-partners-to-???
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-02
Updated: 2021-03-02
Packaged: 2021-03-15 06:22:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29804250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/loveleee/pseuds/loveleee
Summary: “Your parents hate me.”“They do not.”But they both know it’s true. In Alice and Hal Cooper’s eyes, Jughead Jones was the root from which all of their younger daughter’s perceived failures had stemmed. Not in the ways they’d once feared – teen pregnancy, trailer parks – but in ways they’d never even imagined, not in their worst nightmares. Threatening to drop out of college? Giving up on journalism? Tailing dangerous drug dealers and photographing cheating spouses for pay?All Jughead’s fault.Sometimes he even agrees with them.(Betty & Jughead are PIs, but they used to be more. AU.)
Relationships: Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Comments: 20
Kudos: 108





	handle with care

**Author's Note:**

  * For [heartunsettledsoul](https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartunsettledsoul/gifts).



> All the love to heartunsettledsoul, who once upon a time prompted me with "drunk at an office holiday party" (which this is! if you squint!), and to sullypants, who gives excellent advice like "smoosh their heads together!" <3 <3 <3

_you’re the best thing that I’ve ever found,  
handle me with care._

It’s just past midnight when the yellow gleam of Betty’s headlights filters through the blinds.

Jughead takes a sip of his whiskey. There’s another tumbler set out on the coffee table in anticipation of her arrival, though as always when she returns from a late-night stakeout, there’s probably only a fifty-fifty chance she’ll join him.

Betty looks surprised to see him when she lets herself through the door, multiple lens cases slung over both of her shoulders. “What are you still doing here? Get your feet off the table.”

The command sounds like something her mother would say – the words are probably embedded in her DNA – but Jughead complies, letting his socked feet slip to the ground with a soft thud. “Had some paperwork to finish up and figured I might as well stick around.”

He neglects to add that said paperwork had been completed about two hours ago. They’re both here now, and that’s what matters; not the fact that he’d just wanted to see her one more time before they close down the office for the holidays.

Jughead catches her eye and looks towards the whiskey bottle meaningfully. She nods back, and he feels something loosen a little in his chest as he leans forward to pour her a glass.

“You get the money shot?”

“No.” Betty sighs, moving past him into the back room to put away the camera equipment in the safe. Her voice is muffled as she continues. “I couldn’t get a good angle on them. I thought I had one through the lobby, but it’s too blurry.”

“Well, it keeps us on retainer a little longer.” Their wealthy client, Trula Twyst, already knew her wife was being unfaithful, but wanted photographic evidence to give her an edge in the divorce proceedings.

Betty emerges from the office and settles onto the sofa beside him, accepting her whiskey from his outstretched hand. Now that she’s closer, he can see how exhausted she looks: the stray hairs loose from her ponytail, the faint, sooty smudge of mascara beneath her lash lines. It’s unusual for her to settle in for a nightcap when she’s like this. Not that he’s complaining.

“What’s the occasion?” she asks as they clink glasses.

“Company holiday party.” The lame joke actually makes her laugh, which is how he knows she’s _really_ tired. “I should be asking you the same thing. You’re not always up for it this late at night.”

Betty makes a face, leaning back against the throw pillows as she toes her shoes off and tucks her legs up onto the couch cushion between them. For all the shit she gives him for resting his feet on the coffee table, she has no problem getting her own all over the waiting room sofa their clients sit on.

“I don’t want to go home yet.”

Jughead hums in sympathy. “Something happen?”

“Nothing specific.” Betty frowns down at her glass, swirling the liquid in it gently. “Polly and Trev are here with the kids, so no matter how quiet I am getting in, I’m inevitably going to wake someone up and then spend all of Christmas Eve listening to my mom tell me how my selfish life choices are inconveniencing everyone around me.”

After pouring all of her meager life’s savings into her half of the business, Betty had opted to live with her parents for a while in an effort to save money and build back up her rainy day fund. Nearly three years later, he can see more and more that it’s wearing on her. The Coopers were not the easiest people to cohabitate with, regardless of circumstances – and with the odd hours Betty now kept as a private investigator, they were even more prickly and judgmental of her comings and goings than they’d been when she was in high school.

“You have got to move out of there, Betts.” Jughead shakes his head. “You know I’ve got –”

“I know.” She touches his arm, the signal to stop. “I’m working on it.”

If she means to appease him, it doesn’t work, but he resolves to shut up about it anyway. There are only so many times you can invite someone to move into the second bedroom of the trailer where you’d lost your virginity together before the rejection starts to feel personal.

“Sleep here tonight,” he suggests. “It’s what we got the pullout for.”

Betty drops her cheek against the back of the sofa, watching him. “Maybe.”

Something about the way she’s looking at him – the tilt of her gaze, the dim glow of the lamplight – reminds him too much of another time she’d looked at him like that, nearly a decade ago. Soft eyes that see right through him.

Jughead takes a swig of his drink and clears his throat.

“Oh, Jug,” she breathes as she steps through the door. “It’s so pretty.”

Real candles were out – too expensive, and a fire hazard besides that – so he’d borrowed a mile’s worth of fairy lights from Veronica and strung them up around the living room of the trailer. Even he has to admit: it looks pretty good.

“You didn’t have to do this,” she adds, letting him slip her coat off of her shoulders. The lights glimmer off of the green sequins on her dress, and it almost looks like she herself is blinking, sparkling, like she’s the Christmas tree conspicuously missing from the corner of the room on this frigid December night.

He hangs her coat on the hook by the door before turning back to her with a shrug. “I thought it would be nice.”

Betty smiles up at him. Her hair falls over her shoulders, curled into loose ringlets for the dance. Before tonight, he’d never been to a school dance – not a formal one, demanding a suit and uncomfortable shoes and a corsage and, according to Archie, cologne. It hadn’t been as terrible as he’d expected, but only because he’d spent the whole time with Betty.

“It’s very nice.”

Then she does what he’s been hoping she’ll do all night, and launches herself at him, arms wrapping around his neck as their lips meet.

Soon they’re tangled together on his bed, his shirt on the floor, her dress half-unzipped. They’ve had sex three times since he first undressed her here about a month ago, and it’s not like Jughead’s keeping count or anything, but he’s pretty sure they’re about to have it for a fourth.

Betty unhooks her bra and arches into him as he cups her breasts in his palms. When he flicks his thumb over her nipple she makes a sound he hasn’t heard before – like a moan caught low in her throat – and suddenly his only purpose in life is to make her make that sound again.

But when he lowers his face to run his tongue over the place where his thumb had been, her voice stops him. “Juggie.”

He looks up. She’s straddling him, fingers cradling his jaw, cheeks flushed as though she’s only just come in from the chill.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just…” Betty looks him in the eyes, heavy-lidded, almost shy. “I think I’m in love with you.”

It’s almost too much for him: this beautiful girl, vulnerable and warm in his lap, handing him her heart with open hands. It’s not even something he’d wanted, exactly, because to want it would be to imagine that it could ever exist in the first place.

But now that he does, he wants it. He wants it so _badly_.

“I think I’m in love with you too,” he says, and it’s the only lie he’s ever told her.

He _knows_.

“Got any plans for tomorrow?” she asks before he can say something stupid.

“Visiting my dad.” For the last two years he’s gone on Christmas Eve instead of the actual holiday; the traffic is worse, stretching what should be a one-hour drive into nearly two, but it’s too sad to spend Christmas Day itself at the prison, surrounded by restless children visiting their own convict dads.

“Right.” Betty nods. “What about Christmas?”

“A phone date with JB, and dinner at the Andrews.”

It’s what he does every year on Christmas. She knows this. She also knows that this year Archie is spending Christmas with his girlfriend’s family in Michigan for the first time, leaving his dad and his best friend to tough it out for the holiday alone. Her eyebrows tilt together, and he knows what she’s going to say before the words can leave her mouth.

“You and Fred should come over.”

Jughead snorts into his glass. “No.”

“But if it’s just the two of you –”

“No.”

“Why not?” She sounds almost whiny.

Jughead shoots her a look. “You think your mom will be upset you’re getting home late? Wait until you tell her you invited two last-minute guests to her fancy Christmas dinner.”

“She makes too much food anyway. Junie and Woody won’t eat anything but mashed potatoes and cookies. You’d be doing her a favor.”

“Your parents hate me.”

“They do not.”

But they both know it’s true. In Alice and Hal Cooper’s eyes, Jughead Jones was the root from which all of their younger daughter’s perceived failures had stemmed. Not in the ways they’d once feared – teen pregnancy, trailer parks – but in ways they’d never even imagined, not in their worst nightmares. Threatening to drop out of college? Giving up on journalism? Tailing dangerous drug dealers and photographing cheating spouses for pay?

All Jughead’s fault.

Sometimes he even agrees with them.

“They do. And Fred already bought a ham, so.”

Betty scrunches up her face and leans past him to grab the bottle of whiskey. “It would be so much more fun if you were there.”

She’s not wrong. But Jughead can’t bring himself to endure an evening of thinly-veiled insults about the many ways in which he’s ruined Betty Cooper’s life when the core premise behind all of them – that she’s still in love with him – isn’t even true.

He sees her before she sees him, staring up at shelves of pasta sauce in the grocery store on a sunny day in June.

It takes him only a few seconds to clock the differences between now and the last time he’d seen her: hair a little shorter, legs a little tanner, face a little thinner. It doesn’t take him long at all, but it’s long enough for her to turn and see him too, before he can turn on his heel and disappear.

“Jughead.” There’s no way to untangle all the notes he can hear in the single word of his name, so he concentrates on the one that is least terrifying: surprise.

“Hi.”

Betty steps forward and hugs him with the arm that isn’t laden down by a shopping basket. It makes his stomach sink. So that’s where they’re at now: past the stage where casual hugging is too fraught to even consider.

They meet for lunch at Pop’s the next afternoon. She’s in town on summer break from college, and he’s in town because he lives here. When he tells her that he graduated just a few weeks ago with his associate’s degree in history, she reaches across the table and squeezes his hand. “That’s amazing, Jug.”

It’s really not, in his opinion, but it feels so nice to hold her hand and listen to her warm voice again that he swallows down the sarcastic retort on the tip of his tongue.

Archie and Veronica are home for summer, too, and the four of them fall back together into a quartet. They eat burgers at Pop’s, go swimming in the river, sneak beers into the drive-in. It’s not quite like the way things were back in high school – Veronica and Archie had broken up before college, too – but it’s fun, and for the first time in a long time Jughead wakes up each day knowing he will see at least one of the people he loves before he closes his eyes to go to sleep that night.

Then, early one morning when he is driving downtown to the coffee shop where he works part-time, he catches Archie leaving the Pembrooke in yesterday’s clothes.

Jughead confronts him about it the same night, pacing back and forth while Archie sits on his childhood bed with his acoustic guitar. “Are you two _dating_ again?”

“No.” Archie fiddles with the tuning pegs on his guitar, like he’s distracted, but the flush creeping up his neck suggests otherwise. “We’re just hooking up. We’re having fun.”

“But – you can’t just _do_ that,” Jughead protests.

“Why not?”

“Because you’re going to ruin the entire group dynamic,” he sputters. “Because you’re going to get hurt.”

Because Archie is stupid enough – brave enough – to do what Jughead won’t.

“It’s going to be like senior year all over again.”

Archie lays his guitar across his lap. “Ronnie and I…we’re not like you guys. Everything’s not so intense.” He looks up at Jughead. “Have you talked to Betty lately?”

“Of course I’ve talked to Betty. I talk to Betty every day.”

“I mean about your feelings.”

Jughead runs his fingers through his hair. Not for the first time, he wishes he’d kept his old crown beanie after all, and not chucked it in the trash on his first day of community college.

“Betty and I are fine. There are no feelings to talk about. This isn’t about us.” It takes all of his self control not to glance towards the window that faces hers.

Archie snorts. “Sure, man,” he says, and turns back to his guitar.

Betty pours herself another drink, and then swallows half of it immediately. He watches closely as she stands up off of the couch – she’s still kind of a lightweight, if you ask him – but for now, she’s steady on her feet.

“If I’m not going to see you on Christmas, then I guess I have to give you this now.” She crosses the room and bends down to pick up the blue-and-gold-wrapped package that had appeared out of nowhere about a week ago beneath the sad, three-foot faux tree she’d insisted they decorate in the corner of the office. He’d just assumed it was an empty box, another decoration there for show.

Betty places it on the coffee table before him, not without a little effort. Whatever it is, it’s got some heft to it. Jughead leans forward but keeps his hands in his lap, uncertain.

“Am I supposed to open it now?”

“Duh.” Betty’s beside him on the sofa again, glass in hand, closer than she’d been sitting before.

Jughead feels suddenly nervous around her in a way he hasn’t felt in a very long time, and he doesn’t know why. “I thought you were one of those strict no-presents-til-Christmas people.” He knows for certain that her mother is.

“I want to see you open it.” She nudges her knee against his. “Open the present, Juggie.”

When he does, he can’t stop the wide grin that stretches across his face the moment he realizes what her gift is. “Betts. You’re kidding.”

She’s smiling, too. “It is the right one, right? The ‘typewriter of champions,’ you called it?”

“It’s perfect.”

Jughead leans over to give her a hug, and – emboldened by the whiskey, no doubt – moves to press a kiss to her cheek. But at the last second Betty turns her head slightly, and his lips land on the corner of her mouth instead. He feels, more than hears, her sharp inhale.

Pulling away, he clears his throat. “Thank you. This is an incredible gift.”

Betty tucks her hair behind her ears, nodding. There’s a hint of pink high on her cheeks, though it could just as easily be the flush of alcohol as anything else.

“To be clear,” she says, “I’m not suggesting you run off and become a famous author and leave me here to run Twilight Investigations all by myself.”

Jughead runs his fingers over the keyboard, pressing one letter down with his middle finger; it gives with a gentle, satisfying click. “Perish the thought.”

“But I am suggesting that you start writing again. If you want to.” When he meets her eyes, she smiles again, and curls her fingers loosely around his wrist. “I’ve really missed your stories.”

He can’t help but think back to one specific story, one that he’d written the summer before senior year for a fiction contest that he’d ultimately lost. He barely remembers the piece itself, but he remembers Betty reading it for him, splayed out on her floral-print bedspread in shorts and a bikini top with a pen tucked behind her ear. Watching her mark up his prose in red ink, he’d had to sit on his hands to stop himself from touching her.

“I’ve missed it too,” he admits. “Thank you, Betty.”

She withdraws her hand from his arm. “You’re welcome.”

“Now it’s your turn.” Jughead stands and heads for the office, where he’s been keeping her gift in the bottom desk drawer designated “his.”

“Really?”

Jughead stops in the doorway to frown back at her. “You didn’t think I got you a Christmas present?”

“Well, you’re not _ob_ ligated to –”

“Betty.” He laughs.

Her box is significantly smaller than his, and not wrapped half as neatly, but he’s secretly proud of the fact that he’d managed to curl the ends of the ribbon he’d tied around it with the help of a YouTube video and some scissors.

Betty opens the gift as he knew she would, with great deliberation: untying the ribbon, unfolding the wrapping paper along the seams instead of tearing into it like every other normal person on Earth. Jughead hides a smile behind his hand as he watches.

When she opens the little box, she falls silent for a moment. “Are these –?”

“The cufflinks from Hiram Lodge, yeah.”

The diamond cufflinks had been a gift from Veronica’s father, an extra token of gratitude after they’d tracked down and returned his prize-winning purebred Rottweiler, Rocky (short for Rockefeller, and _not_ the scrappy Philadelphian boxing hero, as Jughead liked to point out).

Returning an outrageously expensive show dog to his multimillionaire owner wasn’t necessarily a _meaningful_ win, but it was their first real, significant case working together as partners at Twilight Investigations – their first real victory.

They had no use for the cufflinks, of course. It wasn’t like either of them had much of a reason to wear a suit. But they’d both agreed that they couldn’t sell them, even though doing so would probably have covered the rent on their office space for a few months.

“I had Toni turn them into earrings,” he explains as she pulls one out of the box to examine it more closely. “It felt so stupid just letting them sit there in the safe day after day. And that case was all you, Betty. You deserve to carry that with you.”

Her eyes are glassy when she turns her gaze to him. “Juggie, that’s not even a little bit true. We’re partners.” She sniffs lightly, holding one of the earrings up to dangle beside her earlobe. “But I love them, truly. Thank you.”

Betty hugs him; this time, there’s no attempt at a kiss. But she stays pressed up against him for much longer than he expects, her chin resting neatly in the crook of his shoulder like it was meant to be there all along.

Jughead braces himself as he swings open the front door. No one’s ever knocked on the trailer door at 7 in the morning before, to his knowledge, but whatever’s going on can’t be good.

His shoulders relax when he sees that it’s just Betty. “Hey.”

Her eyes are far too wide and bright for the early hour. “Hi! I’m sorry I woke you.”

“It’s okay.” He steps aside, yawning into his elbow. The trailer is kind of a mess – when you’re caught up in a murder investigation _and_ working full time to pay the bills, household chores tend to fall by the wayside. But Betty’s seen worse. “What’s up?”

Betty doesn’t answer, just holds out an envelope that’s already been torn open. Their names are handwritten on the front: _B. Cooper, J. Jones_.

His heart skips a beat. “Is this the check?”

She watches him intently. “Open it.”

Jughead’s mouth falls open when he sees the amount scrawled out in words, right below his and Betty’s names. “ _Fifteen thousand dollars?_ ” He looks at her in disbelief. “There’s got to be a catch.”

“I don’t think so. Penelope hand-delivered it this morning.” Betty grins. “She woke _me_ up.”

“Wow. This is…this is great.”

It’s not often that Jughead finds himself at a loss for words, but at this particular stage in his young adulthood, a seven thousand dollar windfall is actually a big deal. He could cut back on his hours as a research assistant at Greendale for a few months, and get serious about working on his novel.

Maybe even spend some more of his time with Betty, before she heads back to Maryland for school at the end of August, just a few weeks from now. The thought makes his stomach flip.

“It’s seriously great. And…” Betty exhales in a whoosh. “It’s got me thinking.”

He hands the check back to her. “About what?”

She twists her hands together, and then drops abruptly onto the couch, scooting over to make room for him to join her. “I mean, it’s not the first time I’ve thought about it. But it made me realize…this could really _work_.”

Jughead scratches the back of his head, noting absently that he needs a haircut soon. “I’m lost.”

Betty turns towards him, their knees pressing together firmly. “What if we did this for real? Like, as our jobs?”

Jughead stares at her. “But…you want to be a journalist.”

“My parents want me to be a journalist. I don’t know what I want to be,” she corrects him. “But I do know that investigating Jason’s murder has been the most…the most _invigorating_ thing I’ve experienced, probably ever.”

“I’m not sure there are enough dead bodies piling up in Riverdale to sustain your entire livelihood, Betts.”

There was a reason the sheriff’s department had handled the case so ineptly, leaving it to two amateur sleuths barely over the drinking age to solve: they hadn’t had a murder to deal with in well over a decade.

“Obviously that’s not all we’d do.” She keeps saying that: _we_. Like it’s a given that this is something they’d take on together. “There’s the day-to-day stuff to keep things going. Background checks, cheating husbands. Serving papers. We’d have to get licensed first.”

She blushes a little when she says that; clearly, this is something she’s been thinking about much longer than just this morning.

“But there’s so much more darkness here in Riverdale than we knew when we were kids, Jug. We could be the ones to help clean it up.”

On that point, at least, he knows she’s right. With or without the cold-blooded murder of Jason Blossom marring its reputation, the Town with Pep was teeming with vice just below its picture-perfect surface: gangs, drugs, corruption. Things he’d sensed for all of his life, but never really seen until the veil of childhood was torn away.

And sure, he’d imagined writing about it all one day. But he never thought he’d actually get down in the muck himself.

Betty clasps his hand between both of hers, drawing him out of his thoughts. “We’d be our own bosses,” she says, tilting her head at just the right angle to make him do whatever she wants. “I know you’d like that.”

Jughead groans, pressing his other hand to his forehead. “I can’t believe I’m actually considering this.”

Because truthfully: it’s something he’s thought about too, vaguely, fancifully. It just never sounded like something viable to him – something that was worth all of the effort. The uncertainty.

Not until Betty Cooper said it out loud, and made it sound…real.

Her eyes widen. “Really? Just like that?”

“Hold your horses.” Jughead rests his free hand atop hers. “What’s your timeline here? Don’t you have another year before you graduate?”

Betty stiffens, untangling their hands to pull hers into her lap. “Yeah, that’s…well. I’m actually not going back.”

“They’re going to let you finish your degree remotely?”

“No.” Betty snorts. “No way. I just mean I’m not going to finish.”

The mood shifts so abruptly, Jughead almost wonders if he’s woken from a dream to reality. “Betty.”

“I don’t need a lecture, Jug.”

“But –”

“It has nothing to do with this. It’s a completely separate decision.”

He shakes his head. “That’s bullshit.”

Betty stands up, crossing her arms over her chest. “It’s not bullshit. I decided months ago.”

“ _Why?_ You only have a year left!”

“That’s a year of my life and another forty thousand dollars wasted on a degree I don’t want for a job I’ll never have.”

Jughead scrubs his hands over his face. Maybe if he wakes himself up a little more, this will all start to make sense. “Are you afraid of being unemployed? I know it’s competitive, but you’ll get a job. You’re…Betty Cooper.” The thought of anyone turning down Betty – smart, tenacious, hard-working Betty – for a job is incomprehensible.

Betty laughs, a helpless, heartbreaking sort of sound, her shoulders slumping. “That’s not what I’m afraid of, Jug,” she says. “I’m afraid of waking up in ten years and realizing I’ve become my mother, running the Riverdale Register with two kids and a husband I hate.”

He doesn’t know what to say. He’s always known that her relationship with her mother was strained, but he’s never heard her be so blunt about it.

“Look, I’ve made my decision. This is what I’m doing. Maybe not forever, but for now.” Betty grabs her purse from where she’d left it hanging by the door. “And I’d really like to do it with you. Let me know.”

In the end – after many long, confessional, wine-fueled nights at Veronica’s, and fights with her parents that Archie can hear all the way next door – she does return to the University of Maryland, and completes her BA in journalism a full semester early. The very next week she’s back in Riverdale, pitching him on their partnership again.

This time, he says yes.

When Betty pulls away from his embrace, he sees that she’s crying.

“Betts.” Without thinking, he wipes a tear from her cheek with his thumb. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” She wipes her nose against her sleeve, a move he’s only seen her do a handful of times in the near-lifetime he’s known her. “You’re very sweet to me.”

“Well.” He brushes a lock of hair back from her face. “I love you.”

It’s something he’s said to her hundreds of times – not so often now as when they were seventeen and still in the dizzying flush of new, romantic love, but not so rarely that it should come as a shock to her, either. They’re more than business partners; they’re best friends. Deep down, she is the only person he would trust with his life. That has nothing to do with whether or not she would willingly hold his hand, or kiss him, or touch him.

She knows that he loves her.

But instead of saying it back, as she usually does, Betty starts to cry harder.

His heart pounds painfully behind his sternum. “Betty?”

“I’m sorry.” She turns away, grabbing a tissue from the box on the coffee table to wipe at her eyes. “I’m just – it was a long day, and I haven’t eaten in hours, and the whiskey’s just hitting me, that’s all.”

“Betty.” Jughead takes her gently by the elbows, guiding her back to face him. Their eyes meet, and maybe it’s the liquor, maybe it’s because it’s Christmastime, maybe it’s just the fact that it’s true, that it has _always_ been true, but he can’t stop himself from saying it again: “I love you.”

Her red-rimmed eyes widen in recognition. Slowly, she pulls away.

“I have to go.” Her voice catches on the last word, the sound like a knife through his heart.

Head swimming, Jughead runs a tired hand over his face. “You’ve been drinking. You can’t drive.”

“I know. I’m –” She pauses, tapping at her phone. “I’m getting a car.”

Jughead sits frozen on the sofa as Betty moves about the waiting room in a flurry, grabbing her coat, her purse. He sees her pause for just a second before she picks up the box with the earrings he’d given her, and tucks it into her bag.

He watches her through the storefront window as she waits on the empty sidewalk for her driver to arrive. When the silver Prius pulls up to the curb, she takes one last look back over her shoulder, her expression inscrutable through the frosted glass.

Jughead waits until the glow of the car’s taillights has faded from view, then reaches for the whiskey.

Fred answers the door on Christmas Day wearing his tattered Santa Claus apron, beer bottle in hand. “You know, Jug, you can let yourself in.” He pulls Jughead into a one-armed hug before shutting the door. “You have a key.”

The Andrews house is warm, comfortable, familiar, with a real tree in the corner of the living room like always. It’s decorated the same way every year, draped with colorful string lights and Archie’s handmade childhood ornaments. Jughead grabs a root beer from the fridge – he’s no longer hungover, but after finishing the bottle of whiskey by himself the other night, the thought of more alcohol makes his stomach churn. He settles onto one of the counter stools while Fred mashes potatoes over the stove.

They chat about the usual – Fred’s latest construction projects, Jughead’s latest cases, how FP is doing – their easy rapport filling in the spaces left by Archie’s absence. Archie himself calls a little after two to talk on FaceTime.

Archie seems happy to be spending the holiday with his girlfriend, and after they hang up Fred comments that Archie has told him it’s getting pretty serious. “He wants to ask her to move in with him,” he says, bending down to peer through the oven door at the ham roasting inside. “I told him he’d better prove he can actually do his own laundry first.”

Jughead snorts, but in truth there’s something kind of touching about Archie finally deciding to commit to a relationship, after so many years spent bouncing from girl to girl. “Big move.”

“What about you?” Fred asks, posing the question so casually that Jughead knows it’s anything but. “Anyone catch your eye lately?”

“Me? Nah. You know I’m a lone wolf. But _you_.” Jughead tips his drink towards Fred. “I heard through the grapevine you were at the movies with a certain raven-haired divorcée last weekend.” The grapevine meaning Alice Cooper, of course, whose habit of running the Riverdale Register like she was auditioning to take over Page Six had actually come in pretty handy to Betty and Jughead’s investigations over the years.

Fred raises an eyebrow – they both know that he knows exactly what Jughead is doing – but plays along. “Hermione and I are old friends. And that’s all I have to say about that.”

Christmas dinner is, as always, simple but good: ham, mashed potatoes, green beans, crescent rolls from the can that pops when you open it. After they eat they retire to the living room, where Fred turns on _A Christmas Story_ , and they watch in comfortable silence as Ralphie waxes poetic about his Red Ryder BB gun.

Just after sunset, Jughead feels his eyelids beginning to grow heavy, and he knows it’s time to head home. Before he can make any move to do so, though, the doorbell rings.

He exchanges a look with Fred, who shrugs. “Maybe some carolers,” he suggests.

Jughead ambles into the kitchen to pack up some leftovers while Fred answers the door. There’s no singing, he notes as he spoons the mashed potatoes into a plastic soup container, just the low murmur of Fred and another voice he can’t quite place, until Fred calls out: “Jug! Visitor.”

Popping a sliver of ham into his mouth, Jughead makes his way to the front of the house, stopping short next to the staircase when he sees who’s in the doorway. “Betty.”

Though she’d only had to cross her own front yard to reach Fred’s house, she’s bundled up in her heavy winter coat, hat, and gloves. The tip of her nose is pink. “Merry Christmas, Jug.”

“Merry Christmas,” he echoes.

When neither of them speaks further, Fred clears his throat. “I’m going to go give Mary a call.”

He claps his hand on Jughead’s shoulder and disappears back into the house. Betty sucks her lips into her mouth, looking up at him with wary eyes, and finally asks, “Do you want to go for a walk?”

They head east, towards Pickens Park, where the houses are bigger and the Christmas displays more impressive. Aside from a few cars sailing by on the street, and an older man out walking his dog, the night is quiet and dark, save for the soft yellow glow of the twinkling lights strung along the rooftops.

“So how was Christmas with the Coopers?” Jughead finally asks, after several blocks of silence.

“Oh, good.” Betty flashes him a smile. “Lots of presents, lots of pancakes. Woody knocked over a candle and almost set the living room rug on fire, so obviously we’ll be talking about _that_ incident ‘til he graduates college, at least.”

He laughs. “Poor kid.”

“Mm.” Betty hops delicately over a crack in the sidewalk; she’d always been superstitious about that as a kid, and he finds the fact that she still does it decades later hopelessly endearing. “What about you?”

“Oh, good,” he answers, mimicking the same sing-song-y voice she’d used a moment before. “Talked to JB and my mom, they’re good. Talked to Archie, he’s good. Trula called –”

Betty huffs, indignant. “I hope you didn’t answer.”

“Sent it straight to voicemail,” he confirms.

“She’s so entitled,” Betty murmurs. She slides one hand up under the brim of her hat to scratch at the back of her head, inadvertently baring her ear to him, and he realizes she’s wearing the earrings he’d gifted her the night before.

He tries to keep his tone casual. “Those look nice on you.”

It takes her a moment to understand. “Oh.” Her hand hovers at her ear. “Well – thanks. They’re beautiful.”

Jughead nods. “I’m glad you like them.”

“I’m sorry,” Betty blurts out. “About the other night, I mean. I know I…”

“Freaked out?” he supplies when she doesn’t finish.

Betty nods, her forehead creasing into a frown.

“It’s okay.” Jughead kicks at a stray rock on the sidewalk. “It doesn’t have to mean anything, Betty. We were both drunk, and…it can mean exactly what it’s always meant.”

Without warning, she stops walking. He stops too, a few paces ahead of her, and turns back, tucking his hands into the pockets of his coat. She looks beautiful in the light of the streetlamps, cheeks flushed red from the cold. It almost hurts to look at her.

“But that’s the problem, Jug.” Betty lifts her shoulders in a helpless little shrug. “It’s _always_ meant more.”

He feels like he might be sick. A part of him has always known it would end this way: Betty would recognize his feelings for what they were, and recognize, too, that she couldn’t return them. But he hadn’t expected it to happen so soon. And on _Christmas_.

“I thought we could just…ignore it. Let the work be a distraction,” she continues. She’s growing more animated as she speaks, hands flying this way and that. Jughead takes a step closer, half-worried she’ll smack herself in the face. “And I’m – so _terrified_ of what could happen.”

Betty stops moving, her arms hanging at her sides, and gazes up at him, the oddest expression on her face. It’s not what he’d expected – not sad, or pitying. It’s apprehensive. Hopeful?

He swallows against the growing lump in his throat. “What are you afraid of?”

She keeps her eyes on his as she takes his right hand, squeezing it between both of her own. “That we try, and we fail.” Her voice cracks. “And I lose you.”

“Betty.” His other hand folds around hers. He tugs her forward, lifting their clasped hands to his chest, where he drops his chin and rests his lips against her soft woolen gloves. “You will _never_ lose me.”

Betty makes a soft, pained sound in the back of her throat, and then she’s on her tiptoes and she’s pressing her mouth against his in the warmest kiss he’s ever felt in his life.

Wisps of breath mingle in the cold air between them as she pulls away. When he opens his eyes, she’s too close to see clearly, and he closes them again, nudges his nose against hers as he finds her lips again, again.

Her hands wind under the folds of his coat when she tells him, “I love you, too.”

Two months later, Betty finally gives in, and moves from her parents’ house into Jughead’s trailer.

The second bedroom remains empty, as it’s always been.

**Author's Note:**

> Handle With Care is a great song by the Traveling Wilburys (if you don't know them, ask your dad), but I'm partial to the Jenny Lewis / Ben Gibbard / M Ward / Conor Oberst cover. 
> 
> This fic was 2/3 written for like, over a year, and sat dormant until I finally picked it up again about a week ago - sorry for dropping a Christmas fic on you in March!? lol. but seems like good timing for Bughead Day! 
> 
> I hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, that you'll leave a comment - they bring me great joy and motivation <3


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